Daily Wrap: Google+ Is Breaking the Web and More

Jon Mitchell has a bone to pick with Google+. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet

Jon Mitchell details the problems he’s found with Google’s social offering, Google+. Beyond a few little things that may make the site a pain to use for some, he takes issue with the heavy search integration and the way Google+ posts are prioritized, often above links to the content Google+ conversations are referencing.

This one is a hot topic, with many in agreement, and almost just as many who are calling for Jon’s head on a platter. Jon says that Google+ Is Going to Mess Up the Internet… Agree or disagree?

From the comments:

Chad von Nau – “This article touches on some thoughts I’ve had recently about G+. Google’s strength was indexing the public internet. Then Facebook came along and became a massive, important walled garden. Google can not access Facebook’s data, and so the more data Facebook has, the farther away Google gets from being able to access ALL the world’s data. Google+ is their “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” response. A semi-walled garden that seeks to own people’s data instead of just indexing it. Gmail arguably has the same origins, in that they saw email as a vast, untapped mine of information and wanted a piece of it. The key difference is that no one else ever sees your email, Google only uses it to serve ads (I trust them on this).

Before G+ launched, I had hopes that it would land much closer to where Disqus is today. A way to connect existing data on the internet and add rich functionality and semantic information, rather than creating yet another restricted bin for people to pour their consciousness into. This would have been consistent with what I originally loved Google for, strengthening the public internet. The point this article brings up about Google prioritizing G+ over public websites exemplifies their new competitive strategy.

I’m sad to watch the internet devolve into something more like loosely-connected intranets. We have the chance for universal information, and we’re blowing it. It’s not Google’s fault, it’s is all of ours. Google is just doing their best to stay relevant.”

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